Donald Brooks was a versatile designer whose career broadened to embrace the worlds of Seventh Avenue and the stage. His fashion output in 1962 had included four regular seasonal collections for Townley, a custom made collection for Henri Bendel on 57th Street, a Fifth Avenue store window and Diahann Carroll's clothes for the hit Broadway musical No Strings. When he read in the paper that Richard Rodgers was doing a big musical about a black model in Paris, he took eight models including one black (unheard of in those days) and staged a show right in his office.

Two days later, Brooks was hired to design the costumes for the show and won the New York Drama Critics Award in 1963. While working on No Strings, he was offered costume design roles in two other productions.

The first was a stage production named Barefoot in the Park. The second was the film, The Cardinal, directed by Otto Preminger. He designed over 2,000 costumes including 138 ball gowns for two scenes. This film earned him the first of three Academy Award nominations.

A third Coty award was given to Donald Brooks in 1967. By this time he had created costumes for seven Broadway shows and was now practically commuting between his New York showroom and Hollywood. His design work on the costumes for the 20th Century Fox production, Star!, based on the life of Gertrude Lawrence played by Julie Andrews was all done in his Hollywood studio.

This film featured a collection of 3,000 garments, 126 for Miss Andrews alone. He received his second Academy Award nomination.

"Eschewing mere reproduction, Mr. Brooks chose the more difficult task of imagining the sort of clothes the chic Miss Lawrence would have selected. The designer even had a hand in the creation of the splendid jewels Cartier designed for Miss Andrews in the picture." (Parsons Alumni Magazine,1969)

He received a third nomination for Darling Lili, designing for Julie Andrews again.

Donald Brooks remembers the day in 1962 he passed the test given by the United Scenic Artists as one of the high points of his life. For months before the test, he divided his days between Townley and Henri Bendel.

He would religiously spend his lunch hours in the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art boning up on the history of fashion. "There were 26 applicants," he recalls, "and only two passed. The written test took ten hours and 'as a home project', I had to design an entire production of Faust."

Donald Brooks designed costumes for numerous shows. In 1980 he worked on six projects. All told, he designed for more than thirty Broadway shows, seven films and seven television productions.

One of his last awards was an Emmy Award in 1983 for "outstanding costume design for a special," The Letter, a television production which starred Lee Remick.

Some of the personalities he concentrated his design efforts on were Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Carol Burnett, Ethel Merman, Joanne Woodward, Judy Garland, Carol Channing, Linda Lavin, Sally Kellerman, Faye Dunaway, Mia Farrow, Jean Simmons and Claudette Colbert.

View Donald Brooks' filmography.

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